“Enti Masreya Walla Egyptian?” “(إنتي مصرية ولا إيجيبشن)”
A Journey Through Creative Health, Displacement and Belonging
You could say, I’m chronically confused… in the best way.
I have spent much of my life thinking about what it means to belong, to move, and to find home in uncertain places. Working at the intersection of arts, migration and human-centred support, I often return to my own, deeply privileged, story of displacement to ask: why does creative expression matter to me so much?
In Arabic, I am often asked: “enti masreya walla Egyptian?” It is a joking way of asking if I am a ‘real’ Egyptian or a ‘white-washed’ one. The truthful answer changes all the time. I am constantly shifting, learning and unlearning, about myself, about power, about care. That question of identity is not only about me; it is also about how I came to dedicate my work to improving and overcoming man-built obstacles and challenges, and why I believe the arts are not a luxury but a lifeline.
This piece is the first in a three-part blog series for Counterpoints Arts’ Learning Strand during Creativity and Wellbeing Week. It traces how creative health, movement and cultural identity shape the work I do today.
A heritage of art and healing (as I write this, I am still learning…)
To understand how I arrived here, I have to start with my family.
My great-grandfather, El Sheikh Zakaria Ahmed, who I have only really started learning about in depth recently, was a revered composer for the legendary Umm Kulthum. He discovered her, and together with the poet Beiram Al-Tounsi they formed what the press at the time called the golden triangle. Forty days after Al-Tounsi died, my great-grandfather passed away too.
Zakaria Ahmed is considered a pioneer of early twentieth-century oriental music. He composed 1,070 melodies, 56 operettas and 191 soundtracks for Egyptian films. His work was not just art. It was a cultural force that brought people together, travelled across borders and generations, and continues to live in people’s bodies and memories.
My great-uncle, Tayseer, was also a gifted artist. So from a purely biological point of view, I grew up surrounded by creativity. As a child I played piano and trombone, dabbled in the cello, and spent hours drawing, knitting and painting pottery. That quiet, tactile making has always been my happy place.
My mother, Sally, is a psychotherapist and breathwork specialist. From her I learned the language of feelings, the importance of emotional regulation, and that introspection is a form of courage.
My father, Mohamed, works in the corporate world with dedication and discipline. He gave me a model of structure and pragmatism, a reminder that ideals also need infrastructure.
My sister, Nada, works at the European Institute of Peace in Belgium, dedicating her career to cross-cultural dialogue and conflict transformation. Her work has kept conversations about peace, justice and political responsibility very much alive. She may not know this, but my need to challenge, to fact-check, to research, and my desire to understand what is happening on the ground through lived experience, has come largely from watching her.
Each of them, in different ways, stitched creativity, care and social responsibility into my everyday life. None of this felt abstract; it felt normal. Looking back, I can see how these threads, art, mental health, politics and the quiet work of care, were already weaving the path I walk today.
A life of movement
I am Egyptian, and when I was younger I would spend months at a time in Egypt every year; then it became one month, then just a week or two a couple of times a year. In some ways, I felt more Egyptian then than I do now. But I was born in Uccle, Belgium, and from the start, movement shaped everything.
As a young child I apparently spoke German and French and was learning Flemish. I do not remember any of it now, but the fact that language could appear and disappear like that has stayed with me.
At six, we moved to Saudi Arabia for two and a half years. My first Arabic-speaking friends, the sound of the call to prayer, the particular rhythm of life there, these were my first embodied experiences of ‘Arab-ness’.
At nine, we moved again, this time to Indonesia, where we lived for four and a half years. Indonesia was my favourite. The people I met carried themselves with humility, humour and gratitude. It was there that diversity stopped being an abstract value and became my daily reality. I fell in love with lush landscapes and with how many different ways there are to be human.
The language shift into English was brutal. One minute I was singing “Shankooti”, an Egyptian song by Essam Karika, in the bathroom; the next I was sitting in the school theatre in Jakarta, trying hard to follow a Wayang Kulit performance, a shadow puppet show where flat, intricately carved leather puppets are projected behind a brightly lit screen, relying only on sounds, art, and expressions. Unfortunately, over time, English became my primary language, to my parents’ horror. “Stop speaking in English, speak in Arabic” was a constant refrain. I resented it then. Now, I am incredibly grateful. A big thank you to Mama wi Baba.
At thirteen, we moved again, to Singapore, a carefully engineered, man-made city where I spent five years and finished high school. There, I took up Spanish and discovered my love of languages more deliberately. A school trip to Barcelona sealed it for me. Language was not just a communication tool. It was a bridge into other people’s worlds.
In high school I completed university-level work in art and scored highly in my AP Studio Art exams. But I made a very deliberate choice. I decided not to pursue art professionally. I was afraid that if my livelihood depended on it, it would stop being a refuge. I never worried about grades in art. I loved the process too much. That protection of art as sanctuary would later influence how I think about creative health: not as a product, but as a space of safety.
Each move asked me to start again. Each move taught me resilience, observation and adaptability, and the complicated feeling of always belonging a bit and never fully. Those are the skills and sensations I now recognise in many of the people I meet who have experienced forced displacement, even though our journeys are radically different.
Finding home in London
Eventually, I landed in London, a city that seems to contain more worlds than I can count. I have lived in Shoreditch and Hackney in the East, and Chiswick and Ealing in the West. Each neighbourhood carries different textures: frenetic and loud, leafy and quiet, experimental, conservative, in-between. All of them have, in different ways, felt like home.
Academically, my path has mirrored this variety. I completed a BSc in Psychology, grounding myself in developmental, social and behavioural psychology. That training gave me tools to think critically about human behaviour, not as isolated individual choices but as responses to environments, histories and systems.
I am now pursuing a Master of Applied Science in Creative Health at UCL, a programme that finally felt like the bridge degree I had been looking for. It brings together holistic healthcare, creative practice and psychological (psychosocial) support, and asks how we design systems of care that recognise people as whole, cultural, creative beings.
Modules such as Lived Experiences and Non-clinical Interventions in Health have pushed me to think carefully about whose voices are centred in health systems, and what counts as evidence when we talk about wellbeing. For me, it has been a space to connect my lived experience of movement and my professional work with researching communities to a wider creative health conversation in the UK. I am particularly grateful to people like Dr Thomas Kador and Dr Ngozi for holding that space with care.
Early commitments to care and social change
My desire to help people did not start with a job description. It started when I was young.
In Jakarta, I volunteered with Yayasan Sayap Ibu, the Mother Wing Organization. I helped with childcare, coordinated with caretakers, and shadowed the orphanage workers as they spoke, organised dietary tables and daily schedules, and, most importantly, spent time. The work itself was simple, but it taught me something I have never forgotten. It is in ordinary, consistent acts of care that trust grows. It also showed me how profoundly unequal access to safety, stability and attention can be.
Back in Singapore, during high school, I founded the Make-Up Club at the Singapore American School. On the surface, it might sound light or frivolous. In practice, it became an engine for entrepreneurship and community building. Through events and collaborations, we raised over SGD 90,000 for community initiatives. It was my first real lesson in how creativity, when organised, can move significant resources toward care.
Later, I worked as a Creative Intern at Thrive Psychology Clinic in Singapore. I managed social media, wrote and voiced meditation scripts for adolescents, wrote weekly blog posts about therapy and mental health, and shadowed psychologists. I saw how digital platforms could be used to demystify therapy, share psychoeducation and make support more approachable.
During my undergraduate degree in London, I took a role as a Key Support Worker at Heathcotes Group, providing 24 hour care and personalised plans for high-risk clients. It was demanding and intimate work, helping people with daily tasks, managing crises, and learning how to stay regulated in the face of other people’s distress. It reinforced something I had learned from my mother: care is emotional labour, and it is skilled work.
More recently, I have taken on roles that sit at the intersection of content, strategy and care, helping artists and organisations tell their stories better, reach wider audiences and ground their communications in values of dignity and inclusion.
I also completed an apprenticeship with London Arts and Health, contributing to their Creative Health Mapping Project. That work opened my eyes to the breadth of creative health initiatives across the UK, from small grassroots groups to large institutions. Mapping showed me both what exists and what is missing, and how important it is to make this landscape visible if we want it to grow. I am now continuing to work with London Arts and Health one day a week alongside (the amazing) Amalia Restrepo, as further funding has allowed the mapping project to expand.
Why refugees and the arts
My commitment to refugees and to art based approaches is both personal and political.
Because I have moved so often, I understand, in a limited and privileged way, what it feels like to be the outsider, to not understand the language, to have to code switch. But I also understand the vast difference between my experience and that of someone who has fled war, persecution or occupation.
Relocating by choice, with a passport that opens borders, is not the same as being forced to escape your home under threat, and then being met with hostility, suspicion or bureaucracy at every turn.
As an Arab woman, I know what it means to be othered. I know the calculations that go into deciding whether to put my full name on a job application. I have felt the pressure to soften my accent or choose my words carefully to avoid triggering stereotypes. These are the small violences of everyday life that many people with racialised or migrant backgrounds recognise.
At the same time, my family’s political consciousness has exposed me to much more explicit forms of violence and injustice. My sister stood in Tahrir Square during the January 25th uprisings. She has seen things that are hard, maybe impossible, to fully narrate. We have had friends taken from their homes at night by corrupt officers, money stolen, families left without information for over a year before discovering their loved ones were in distant prisons. Family members, friends, and acquaintances have been asked to smuggle morning-after pills into detention centres for women who had no other options.
These are not distant stories. They belong to people I know and love. They live in my body as anger and grief, but also as responsibility.
A trip to Greece brought some of these threads into even sharper focus. A friend and I met American navy personnel who were frustratingly silent about their mission to Israel. Their refusal to engage, the non-answers, the carefully trained evasions, all of it illustrated how power works: how people can participate in systems that create displacement and suffering, while remaining shielded from the human consequences of their actions.
That encounter also made visible how propaganda and misinformation shape narratives about entire populations. I watched people who were clearly intelligent repeat lines that flattened Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims and sanctuary seekers more broadly into threats or burdens. The gap between their humanity and the stories they had absorbed was devastating.
In that gap, I kept coming back to empathy, not as a soft, sentimental feeling, but as a hard, political capacity. The ability to see another person as fully human is not neutral. It has consequences. And, crucially, it can be cultivated.
This is where the arts come in for me.
Creative health and sanctuary: my work with Counterpoints Arts
Right now, three strands of work hold a lot of my attention: my research placement at Counterpoints Arts, my volunteer programming work and freelancing, and more recently London Arts and Health.
Reformation Charity London is a student-led charity that creates opportunities for students to fundraise and support communities locally and internationally, and to expand their horizons through solidarity work. It is not formally a creative health organisation, but I bring my creative health perspective into the ways I think about care, storytelling and participation there.
At Counterpoints Arts, I have had the chance to explore these questions more systematically. Most recently, I conducted research examining how organisations across the UK integrate mental health, art and wellbeing into Refugee Week programming.
Between September and October 2025, I interviewed seven organisations, from small, volunteer-led groups to major cultural institutions, based in London, Aberdeen and Berlin. My starting questions were simple. What are you offering? Who is it for? How, if at all, do you think about mental health in this work?
What emerged was powerful. Collectively, the programmes had engaged over 850 participants. Across drumming circles, clay workshops, visual arts sessions, play based activities, music programmes and communal cooking, a pattern repeated.
Creative expression offered people a way to process experiences without having to explain themselves in clinical language.
Social connection, sitting in a circle, sharing tools, watching someone else’s performance, reduced isolation and helped people feel less alone.
Trauma-informed facilitation, whether or not it was named as such, created safer conditions for people to take part: attention to choice, no pressure to share, clear boundaries and predictable routines.
In short, even when organisations did not label their events as mental health or creative health programmes, they were already functioning as informal spaces of care.
I documented these findings in a 164 page internal report, then translated them into more accessible formats: a shorter, public facing piece titled Spaces of Care: Integrating Mental Health into Refugee Week Art Events, and a practical guide for organisations planning Refugee Week 2026 activities. If you are interested in the full report, please reach out to Counterpoints Arts and Refugee Week.
That process taught me something essential about research. Its value is not just in analysing what works, but in feeding that knowledge back to practitioners in ways that are usable, respectful and timely. Otherwise, we risk treating lived realities and frontline labour as raw data rather than as sources of expertise.
At the same time, the research revealed deeper tensions that I am now exploring even further in my MASc dissertation. Creative health programmes promise care, inclusion and healing, but they operate within immigration and asylum systems that are, by design, hostile. When you run a beautiful, person centred workshop in a context where someone’s housing, legal status or right to remain is constantly under threat, what does wellbeing really mean?
The practitioners I interviewed who have their own lived experience of migration or asylum perceive these contradictions acutely. They understand, in their bodies, how limited programmes can be when basic rights are insecure. Their insights are shaping the questions I ask now: not only What works? But for whom? Under what conditions? And at what political cost?
Working alongside Counterpoints Arts has shown me that creative expression can offer people something systems often strip away: agency, visibility and the right to self represent. Art allows people to narrate themselves beyond the category of refugee, as musicians, parents, comedians, cooks, dancers, nerds, poets, engineers, humans.
Creative health as a lifeline
Through this work, I have seen over and over that art becomes a language when words fail. I have watched someone who barely speaks in formal settings come alive through rhythm. I have seen people relax, laugh and make eye contact for the first time in weeks over craft or shared food. I have listened to poems that hold more truth than many policy documents I have read.
For me, creative health is not what people often mistake as ‘art therapy’, and it is not a replacement for clinical mental health support. It is a wider recognition that creativity and community is a fundamental part of being human, and that access to creative expression, especially in contexts of displacement (and seeking sanctuary), is a matter of dignity and rights.
The people I work with continue to teach me what resilience actually looks like. I use that word cautiously, knowing it is often demanded from those who are given the least. What I witness is not a glossy idea of resilience, but the everyday decision to keep showing up, to tell stories, to care for others, and to insist on joy and connection despite everything.
The privilege and politics of helping
On paper, my CV looks chaotic. International schools, multiple countries, a patchwork of roles in mental health, corporate environments, arts, social media and care work. For a long time, this felt like a flaw, a symptom of being scattered.
Being diagnosed with ADHD at 21 shifted that narrative. Suddenly, my need for stimulation, my deep dives into new interests and my resistance to staying in work that did not feel meaningful made more sense. ADHD has not always been easy to navigate, but it has definitely fuelled my creativity, empathy and adaptability.
Because I grew up in international schools, I speak with an American accent. People often assume that means a certain background or stance. For me, the accent is a reminder of privilege, but also of something larger. It reflects the reach of American soft power in the world, and the false sense of authority it can create, and the legacy of colonial and neo-colonial influence in education. Many international schools, especially in formerly colonised countries, export not only a curriculum but an accent, a way of speaking that students carry into the world. It is strange to realise how many of us leave these schools sounding similar, regardless of where we are actually from.
There have been moments when these layers became painfully clear. At one workplace, after I had left a shared space with an HR colleague, the boss reportedly asked her to listen to my accent and check where I might be from. He wanted to know if I was Indian. If I had been, he said, he would have had concerns, after expressing racist views about Indian nationals who had come to work with the office. Once he was reassured that I was not, the concern disappeared. That incident has stayed with me as a small but sharp example of how race, nationality and accent can determine who is welcomed, who is tolerated and who is quietly pushed out. I left that interaction feeling human and confused. He was later reported to HMRC for under-paying Indian nationals and skipping out on taxes. Bare in mind, he himself, was an Indian citizen who’d only recently gained British citizenship.
My accent is therefore both a personal history and a symbol of larger systems: access to certain kinds of education, the dominance of English, the subtle hierarchies of whose voices are heard and taken seriously, and the everyday racism that shapes how people are treated long before their skills are seen.
That privilege became painfully clear whenever I tried to settle into roles that were financially rewarding but ethically empty. Meetings about selling devices or pushing platforms for multinational companies always left me cold. I could perform the job, but underneath I was asking: Who does this help? What kind of world does this reinforce? Will I be proud of this ten years from now?
The only constant through all of this has been my desire to be useful. To put my skills, analytical, creative and relational, in service of something that feels like it moves us, even slightly, towards justice.
I am deeply aware that being able to prioritise meaningful work over pure financial gain is a privilege in itself. I do not romanticise that. But I also know that ignoring that internal compass makes me unwell. So I have chosen to orient my work towards people, not products.
Enti masreya walla Egyptian? (إنتي مصرية ولا إيجيبشن)
I think often about what it means to claim an identity, to be claimed by a place, or to live in between.
I do not believe any of us can be reduced to a single origin story. I am Egyptian, Belgium born, globally raised, London based. I am a granddaughter of musicians and healers, a sister to a peace practitioner, a student of creative health, a support worker, a volunteer, an angry observer of injustice, and a hopeful believer in people.
So when someone asks me, ‘enti masreya walla Egyptian’, am I really Egyptian, or just partly, performatively so, the answer changes depending on the day. But today, I will say it simply:
Yes, ana masreya.
And from this place, with all its contradictions, privileges and responsibilities, I will keep using what I have at 26: my heart, my education, my lived experience, my languages (both fluent and broken) to support people who have been forcibly displaced.
I will keep insisting that the arts are not an extra. They are a form of infrastructure for survival and imagination. They are how people in impossible situations make sense of their lives, hold on to themselves, and communicate with others when systems refuse to listen.
Looking ahead: learning, integrity and creative health
As I continue my MASc in Creative Health at UCL, I am eager to work with others who are also trying to do this work with integrity: artists, organisers, health workers, researchers and, crucially, people with lived experience of displacement, and people with lived experience of facilitation, safeguarding and holding space.
This blog is the first in a three part Learning Strand series with Counterpoints Arts for Creativity and Wellbeing Week. Together, the series explores:
- This piece, how my journey through movement, heritage and creative health has shaped my commitment to refugee communities.
- The second blog, what creative health practice actually looks and feels like, and the gap between frameworks and lived reality. Here I will also highlight some of the work that Maren, Mental Health and Arts Producer at Counterpoints Arts, and I are doing together.
- The third blog, the deeper questions I am sitting with: the contradictions between care and control; the ethics of witnessing suffering; and what sustainable, dignified support for displaced communities truly requires. This will also reflect on the work that Maren and I are developing together, including our learning around facilitation, safeguarding and impact.
If there is one invitation I want to leave you with, it is this:
Listen to people seeking sanctuary. But more importantly, be human. Seek out art rooted in lived experience: writing, music, film, performance. Notice and challenge any ‘us and them’ language, in yourself and around you. Support organisations, including grassroots initiatives. Reach out to Counterpoints Arts, Refugee Week and others.
Question and challenge the policies that criminalise movement and care. Seek out active student led charities like Reformation Charity London and many others that try to expand what the student experience can be. Create safer spaces in your own contexts, and collaborate with existing networks, so that these stories can be told on their own terms. If you are not sure where to start, contact Counterpoints Arts or Dijana for suggestions and recommendations.
Behind every policy, statistic or headline about all of us is a human being with a rich interior world, with talents, with jokes, with grief, with joy. Creative health work, at its best, helps make that visible again. I am not illegal. You are not illegal. No one is illegal.
About the author
Zeina Ahmed Ismail is pursuing an MASc in Creative Health at UCL and works with Counterpoints Arts, London Arts and Health, and Reformation Charity, supporting refugee communities through creative health initiatives.
Her current MASc dissertation explores how creative health programmes for people seeking sanctuary navigate the tensions between care and control within hostile immigration and asylum systems. It looks at what is made possible in creative spaces, what is constrained by policy, and how practitioners with lived experience of migration understand these tensions. The dissertation will be shared through UCL once it is completed.
This blog was first drafted when Zeina had just started working with Counterpoints Arts, and she has only recently revisited and updated it. Returning to it now has been a way of noticing how her thinking and practice have shifted over time.
Alongside her research, Zeina is working with Maren, Mental Health and Arts Producer at Counterpoints Arts, on a Mental Health and Arts impact timeline, tracing the learning and legacies of Counterpoints’ work in this area. She has recently assisted in the Spaces of Care event at the Museum of Making in Derby, a collaboration between Counterpoints Arts and partners including Emily Milly from the Migration Museum, Nicola Bird from MultakaOxford, and Maren and Zeina from Counterpoints Arts.
Zeina is also closely following and in conversation with Hopeful Mess, the facilitation and safeguarding practice co-founded by Nzinga and Maren. In the current global climate, their approaches to holding space, building consent based processes and embedding safeguarding in arts and cultural work feel urgently needed in organisations and workplaces.
In parallel, Zeina and Maren are exploring possibilities for collaboration with Rethink Mental Illness, in dialogue with colleagues including Ruqia Osman and Nisa Chisipochinyi, to strengthen connections between mental health advocacy, community ground work, creative practice and lived experience leadership.
You can find Zeina on Instagram at @_zeina.z__ and contact her at:
zeina@counterpoints.org.uk, zeina@ccreatorteam.org, or zeina.ahmed.ismail@gmail.com, or message at: +447538305841
You can also follow:
Maren at @marenellermann
@multakaoxford
@counterpointsarts
@refugeeweek
@migrationmuseum
to learn more about the projects, networks and communities connected to this work.
